June is a wild rollercoaster ride of talks and workshops that I’m giving, and I wanted to make sure folks know about the wonderful conferences I’m heading to — hopefully I’ll see you there!
June 3-4: Personal Democracy Forum, New York City. This is one of my favorite conferences all year because it’s one of the few that blend many worlds well together: Technology, electoral politics, advocacy politics and cultural analysis. I’m giving a 10-minute talk on Thursday, June 3, that will (definitively!) answer the question: “Can the Internet fix politics?” Muwahaha. Other luminaries on the speaking roster include Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, Cheryl Contee, Jane Hamsher, Arianna Huffington, Esther Dyson, Anil Dash and many, many more. Register today — I’ve got a code to give you $100 off the registration; just email me and ask for it.
June 7-9: America’s Future Now, Washington DC. A yearly pilgramage to DC for progressives, where we talk strategy and tactics for challenging the right-wing agenda. I’ll be moderating a workshop on Tuesday morning, June 8, on social networking with Toby Chaudhuri, and we’ve actually turned it into a gameshow format: Social Media Jeopardy! Contestants will be Lizz Winstead, Garlin Gilchrist II, Scott Goodstein and Heather Holdridge. Also, Monday night, June 7, will see the DC launch of my book, thanks to Toby and Scott of Revolution Messaging, who are throwing me a killer party. Wooooo! Register today for all the goods.
June 9-11: Making Media Connections, Chicago, IL. I’m thrilled to be keynoting this gathering of non-profit communicators, put together by the Community Media Workshop. This year’s theme is “Storytelling and Strategy in the Digital Age,” which hits home strong for me– it’s through our stories that we have always made change, and our shiny new digital tools give us unprecedented capabilities to tell them. Register today for this amazing conference. (PS — That Friday night, June 11, I’ll be reading at Women & Children First, and having a party afterwards nearby.)
A week and a half ago, I received an email asking me if I’d be willing to do an Ignite talk for the March 4 NYC event, part of Global Ignite Week. If you’re not familiar with Ignite, here’s the deal: You have 5 minutes to give your talk; you create a PowerPoint presentation to go with the talk, but here’s the kicker: You must do 20 slides, and the slides will advance automatically every 15 seconds. Talk about creative restraint inspiration! Not only is it an amazing challenge and a great place to flex your speaker muscles, but the Ignite platform also reaches far and wide into multiple communities, and can be a huge opportunity to reach lots of audiences with your message. Was I up for it? Sure.
Then the panic set in. Oh my God, what I have I signed myself up for?
On Saturday, I gave a the closing keynote talk at Organizing 2.0 here in NYC, a one-day conference designed to bring together labor folks, community organizers and netroots people to work on strategies for integrating online and offline organizing. A fun time was had by all! Here’s the video (thank you, Sum of Change!), and below are my notes from the talk.
I was lucky enough to present at Personal Democracy Forum 2009 with Tanya Tarr and Rasmus Nielsen on challenges we face in the brave new world of “on-the-fly organizing.” (Thanks to Judith Freeman for moderating, and to Kristen Psaki for recording, too!) Here’s the video from our talk, and below that are my slides if you wanna follow along.
Here’s some links to the presentations and workshops that I led and co-led all week; thanks to the participants who took killer notes. There’s tons of incredible info on, and being added to, this wiki, so check back often:
Just to call out this great presentation I had the pleasure of giving via webinar to the National Safe Schools Roundtable yesterday — and a big shoutout to Sarah Young of ACLU-MS for major coordination skillz! A good time was had by all:
I’m excited to head upstate next week, back to some old stomping grounds in Ithaca, NY. I’m participating in the Park Center for Independent Media’s symposium, and I’ll be presenting with David Mathison some thoughts on rapid response and journalism via social networking tools like Twitter. Yippie! It’ll also be good to see a bunch of friends and colleagues — Roberto Lovato (who is putting his faith in my Dunkin-Donuts-fueled driving skills, bless his heart), Tracy Van Slyke, Robert Greenwald, David Cohn, Amanda Michel… the list goes on and on.
Then a day or two of downtime with the parents while I’m in the neighborhood, which always does the soul some good. But alas, it’ll be back to the city to resume apartment hunting madness. Anyone have any leads on a dog-friendly 2 bedroom apartment in Brooklyn?
[If you weren't in LA, you might find it interesting, but my disclaimer is that this isn't in any way an end-all be-all on "the Web 2.0." It's a primer for media folk who wanted to be brought up to speed, and avoids geek-speak as much as possible. :-) ]
I’m in the middle of preparing a 15-minute presentation that I’m giving at the end of the month on the evolution of the Interweb, and I’ve just learned some startling news. Web 2.0 sites are the leading cause of clogged pores and pimples on over 75% of the Internet’s skin:
(note: You can look at the 
